Most IT teams don’t have the budget or resources to satisfy the growing demands of their users. The demand comes in many forms, such as bandwidth consumption, Wi-Fi access, power utilization, and storage capacity; just to name a few.
However, the demands of the business networks go beyond increasing capacity. Manpower is hard to come by in the IT field since IT many times gets the short end of the stick when it comes to budget. Smaller companies are reluctant to hire in-house IT staff and when they do hire, it is usually a low resource operation. Essentially, IT pros are the "firemen" of a business, since they are the ones constantly battling network fires.
Repelling Network Fires at Klein Steel
Rob Smura of Klein Steel Service is a one-man IT army. Klein Steel is a steel services company that processes around 12,000 tons of custom metal components to 2,400 customs nation wide while maintaining regulatory mandates for customers in the petrochemical and nuclear power industries. Besides the typical endpoints like desktops and printers, Klein Steel’s facility includes robots, lasers and high-power water jets. These devices are as critical to business, so Rob always needs to know when an issue is going to happen before it happens. There are regulatory controls on materials, quality, handling and shipping which means there needs to be virtually zero downtime in factory floor integration to ERP.
Many of these machines are automated, so the result of not proactively monitoring these devices means that more labor is necessary for manual efforts when these machines do go down.
This in turn affects deliverables for the thousands of their customers. That influences reputation and ultimately revenue.
This is exactly why Rob implemented WhatsUp Gold.
Being Proactive vs. Reactive
WhatsUp Gold helps Rob and Klein Steel take a
proactive approach to network monitoring. For example, monitoring drive usage when a server
drive is close to being full. Rob receives an alert once those drives reach a certain threshold.
“With WhatsUp Gold, I get notified that something is down on the network, or about to go down, before users even know it has happened.”
Rob’s enthusiasm for WhatsUp Gold comes from how WhatsUp Gold simplifies and maps out a very complex network.
“I felt like I needed to put on a fireman’s suit before coming to work because that’s all I did. But once I implemented WhatsUp Gold and got everything configured, my job went from ‘fireman’ to ‘hero’. That’s a great feeling for any IT team.”
Surprisingly, there is also an organizational innovation element to using WhatsUp Gold at Klein Steel. When Rob started working at Klein Steel he noticed there were a lot of repetitive tickets coming in. IT takes time to consolidate repetitive tickets. With WhatsUp Gold, Rob was able to create a NOC view of the network status running live. This allowed users to get insight into any known issues on the network in realtime, resulting in a decrease in redundant helpdesk tickets.
Simple Network Monitoring Configuration
The configuration process is very simple in WhatsUp Gold. In Rob's case, WhatsUp Gold noticed most of the devices on the network out of the box, which meant less time configuring devices that were not initially recognized.
Once configured and running, WhatsUp Gold changed the face of IT at Klein Steel and helped stop the business from bleeding money from downtime.